Global Justice and Bioethics

Edited by Joseph Millum and Ezekiel J. Emanuel

This is the first book to bring together in a comprehensive way the topical questions of global justice and bioethics. As such, it provides analysis of current controversies relating to health, development, and justice from some of the best philosophers, political scientists, and bioethicists in the field.

Global Justice and Bioethics

Edited by Joseph Millum and Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Description

Despite the massive scale of global inequalities, until recently few political philosophers or bioethicists addressed their ethical implications. Questions of justice were thought to be primarily internal to the nation state. Over the last decade or so, there has been an explosion of interest in the philosophical issues surrounding global justice. These issues are of direct relevance to bioethics. The links between poverty and health imply that we cannot separate questions of global health from questions about fair distribution of global resources and the institutions governing the world order. Similarly, as increasing numbers of medical trials are conducted in the developing world, researchers and their sponsors have to confront the special problems of doing
research in an unjust world, with corresponding obligations to correct injustice and avoid exploitation.

This book presents a collection of original essays by leading thinkers in political theory, philosophy, and bioethics. They address the key issues concerning global justice and bioethics from two perspectives. The first is ideal theory, which is concerned with the social institutions that would regulate a just world. What is the relationship between human rights and the provision of health care? How, if at all, should a global order distinguish between obligations to compatriots and others? The second perspective is from non-ideal theory, which governs how people should behave in the unjust world in which we actually find ourselves. What sort of medical care should actual
researchers working in impoverished countries offer their subjects? What should NGOs do in the face of cultural practices with which they deem unethical? If coordinated international action will not happen, what ought individual states to do?

These questions have more than theoretical interest; their answers are of direct practical import for policymakers, researchers, advocates, NGOs, scholars, and others. This book is the first collection to comprehensively address the intersection of global justice and bioethical dilemmas.

Global Justice and Bioethics

Edited by Joseph Millum and Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Table of Contents

1. IntroductionJoseph Millum and Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Ideal Theory2. Global Bioethics and Political TheoryJoseph Millum3. Is there a Human Right to Essential Pharmaceuticals? The Global Common, the Intellectual Common, and the Possibility of Private Intellectual PropertyMathias Risse4. Global Justice and Health: The Basis of the Global Health DutyJonathan Wolff5. Justice in the Diffusion of InnovationAllen Buchanan & Robert O. Keohane

Global Justice and Bioethics

Edited by Joseph Millum and Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Author Information

Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health; co-editor of ETHICAL ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH and THE OXFORD TEXTBOOK OF CLINICAL RESEARCH ETHICS

Contributors:

Global Justice and Bioethics

Edited by Joseph Millum and Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Reviews and Awards

"The most innovative contributions include the arguments by Buchanan, Cole, and Keohane for a Global Institute for Justice in Innovation awarding prizes, grants, and extended intellectual monopoly privileges for new technology that has enabled proven community innovation (chapter 5, "Justice and the Diffusion of Innovation"). This would be funded by a World Bank subscription system. Also significant is the case Eyal makes for independently accredited Global Health Impact Labels that would apply to companies and their products involved in health care (chapter 10, "Global Health Impact Labels")." -- JAMA